The human brain is a miracle of nature. Your learning style is unlike any other. Play to your unique strengths and you’ll pick up skills and knowledge at an incredible pace. According to the VARK model, there are four distinct learning categories: visual, auditory, reading and writing, and kinesthetic. If you’re more tactile than logical and find it easier to learn through doing, you fall into the latter set. If there’s a skill worth learning, there’s an app to teach it, and software is particularly good at replicating the kinesthetic learning experience. Picking up knowledge has never been simpler.
The Gift of Music
Music is not only the highest form of art, but a way to enhance your memory, too. Playing an instrument enhances spatial-temporal skills by 34%, and you needn’t leave your living room to take classes.
-1) Gismart’s piano app teaches you all the basics you need to become a budding musician. You can use it on iOS devices and it’s one of the few applications that gives you a full keyboard to work with. Once you’ve learned your chords, classical and contemporary tunes will introduce you to the mathematics behind the music without requiring you to look at a single number. If you despise the idea of learning sheet music, this is the ideal app for you.
Learning to play an instrument helps you to develop a skill called “neurophysiological distinction”, a kind of literacy that helps you to perform better academically. Music also has potent therapeutic properties, engaging you on a creative level while boosting your ability to learn. Playing an instrument soothes away anxiety and can even alleviate the symptoms of depression temporarily.
Becoming a Math Genius
Mathematics requires interaction between four different brain regions, so working with numbers helps to build and strengthen the neural pathways needed for rational thought.
-2) If you want to bolster your knowledge, Pythagorea is Horis’ premium offering for kinesthetic learners is ideal for the visually inclined. Instead of appealing to your intellect directly, it teaches you through an array of image-based tasks, engaging your visual memory instead. The app has eight difficulty levels to guide you along a gentle learning curve, and if you’re truly stumped, it’ll let you move to the next task.
The brain is constantly evolving to reflect what you learn. Bringing math into your daily life will cause new synapses to form and strengthen existing neural pathways. Even once you’ve put the app down, your competence with figures and logic will be enhanced, affecting almost every area of your life.
-3) If you’re looking for basic mathematics knowledge, Google Play’s Math Tricks will give you tools for honing the basics through "gamification." Everything from exponentiation to elemental addition can be practiced.
Poker and the Tactile Pupil
Gamification has become a popular learning method for excellent reason: it’s fun, and when learners feel entertained, they’re more engaged, which is precisely the tonic your brain needs to pick up skills.
-4) A poker-specific application such as the 888Poker App helps you to develop several different aptitudes. If logic isn’t your strong suite, it will strengthen your rational thinking ability. At heart, the game is simply a series of puzzles that need resolving, so playing online or off teaches you a few stellar problem-solving skills. Your concentration during the game is self-perpetuating in that the more you focus, the better your concentration becomes. If you’re a math and statistics fan, this game has you covered in those areas, too. People playing poker live will teach you how to decipher behavior better, developing the skills you need to negotiate a bargain, amplify your sales figures, and manage employees more effectively.
Looking to the Stars
-5) Journey into the magical world of stargazing with the kinesthetic Star Walk, an interactive guide that’s as exquisite as it is useful. You don’t need an internet connection, so the app won’t limit your lessons to city streets. Simply take your iPad with you on your night hike and learn about constellations, satellites, and stars while you travel. The app won an award for its graphics, which are striking enough to tempt you to into developing a regular stargazing schedule, and an events-based calendar makes sure you can track satellites on the correct dates. If you prefer to learn at home, simply view it on your big screen display. Learning doesn’t get more adventurous than this, and the more you use the app, the better you’ll get at navigating by the night sky.
-6) If space travel appeals to you more than sky-watching, NASA’s Lunar Electric Rover Simulator puts you in charge of your own lunar outpost, where you’ll get to perform many of the tasks real astronauts do. Several difficulty levels let you create a manageable learning curve, and if your motor coordination leaves much to be desired, you’ll get to develop your skills on the lunar surface. While you play, you’re fed facts that relate to your activities, and you’ll even get to make your own moon base out of NASA structures. If you need to practice your 3D modeling this is a fun way to start.
When Particles Collide
Science literacy is at an all-time low. Only 28% of U.S. adults can cope with complex scientific problems, and schools are notorious for rushing through abstract concepts in a way that makes the subject seem irrelevant and dull. This is by far the worst way to learn the sciences.
-7) LHSee has an integrative approach to learning, putting you in touch with the experiments being conducted on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, where scientists are looking for answers to many of mankind’s most complex questions. The app works on most devices, and was written by scientists from Oxford University. It essentially puts you right in the center of the action in the laboratory that discovered the Higgs Bason.
If you're not geeky enough to know much about CERN, this will all seem like gibberish to you, but it's far easier to understand when you're watching particles in action. The Large Hedron Collider is a particle accelerator that gives scientists a fresh understanding of nature and time. 3D graphics of collisions can be viewed through LHSee. You can even watch live streaming of important experiments. Maybe you'll be watching when science's next legendary discovery unfolds in real time. Since CERN's Collider is the world's largest, it's the foundation for some of the science world's most important work.
If you’re a kinesthetic learner, you struggle with abstract ideas. Making your lessons concrete and sensory will have an almost miraculous effect on your ability to retain information. Studying examples and case studies that render concepts in living color will appeal to your kinesthetic strengths, but there is still no method quite as effective for you as hands-on experience. Whether you’re putting yourself through university, picking up a new skill, or are simply a perpetual student of life, you’re responsive to things you can see and actively shift around. In an era dominated by pixels and code, your mode of learning is only a click away.
